I come to you today asking how one should go about raising awareness for their new oshw product. I just started my OSHW business (Galvant Industries) and I launched my first oshw product about 3 weeks ago: a usb-to-gpib adapter. I started off slow (to get a feel for the shipping process) by posting to just the eevblog forums, my small time youtube channel, then to the /r/electronics and /r/ece subreddits. All together I've sold 6 adapters. I'd like to step that up in order to grow my business, fund the production of more projects, and get my own website.
Some background on myself: My name is Steven Casagrande and I'm a MSc Physics student at the Institute for Quantum Computing, University of Waterloo. As a scientist (in training?) I know the importance of the freedom of information. I love the concept of OSHW and I want to be a part of this movement. My desire is for my business to grow such at a rate such that when I'm done with my masters program I can transition to working on it full time. As a UW student, I get to keep 100% of the IP rights on anything that I build or design (one of the few universities in North America to do so). Since I focus mostly on EE related projects (it is my passion afterall!) I also have the ability to release those as OSHW and commercialize them.
Back to the problem at hand. I submitted my project to hackaday.com on Saturday in the hopes of being featured to drive some more interest. I'm still waiting; I'm sure they get many submissions. Are there other places that I should be informing that are also alright with the fact that its for sale? For example, I'd love to show it off on the adafruit "show-and-tell" segment, but I fear it would be poorly received when I mention "hey by the way its for sale".
Thanks for any and all help!
By the way, if you check out my github repositories, and find that I missed something for OSHW compliance, please let me know as it is an accidental oversight.
Relevant links:
- Youtube channel - http://www.youtube.com/user/stevencasag ... ature=mhee
- Github - https://github.com/Galvant